As Funding for Nuclear Weapons Grows, So Does University Involvement, Report Says

When the University of California and the Texas A&M University systems were selected last year to manage a nuclear-weapons laboratory, researchers at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, were interested.

The University of California wasn’t a surprise. The system had been managing the facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, since its creation, during World War II. But the fact that another university had been added to the contract seemed to confirm the advocates’ suspicion that nuclear proliferation, and universities’ involvement in it, is again on the rise.

Nate Van Duzer, a policy and research intern who is earning his master’s in global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, dug into the work that American universities do to help the federal government pursue its nuclear agenda. The result is an 80-page report, released on Wednesday, that asserts that a renewal of the nuclear-arms race has been bolstered by increased university involvement in the nuclear-weapons industry.

“We discovered links to about 50 colleges and universities that are undergirding the U.S.’s push for new nuclear weapons,” Van Duzer said. “This is happening in contravention of many university mission statements.”

Federal spending on the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons has increased in recent years, according to the report. Spending on the nuclear arsenal will reach $500 billion in the next 10 years, according to some estimates. In March, Defense News reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration requested an 8.3-percent increase over its current annual budget, to $16.5 billion, with weapons-related projects receiving $12.4 billion.

University involvement in the national defense industry is not new, but it has also grown, the report says. Many of the announcements about university agreements that Van Duzer reviewed, he said, had come out within the last five years.

The report divides the relationships between universities and the nuclear industry into four categories: direct management, when a university operates a lab on behalf of the government, as the University of California and Texas A&M do; institutional partnerships, in which the National Nuclear Security Administration collaborates with universities on research; more informal partnerships and grants; and job training.

‘Stewards of the Stockpile’

Bolstering the work force is particularly important to the nuclear industry and its relationship with universities, according to the report. In the next five years, more than 40 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workers will be eligible for retirement, according to testimony by a top Department of Energy official at a U.S. Senate committee hearing this year.

Some of the work the agency conducts is meant to ensure that nuclear weapons are secure and reliable. To recruit younger scientists, the agency is funding grants to support “doctoral and master’s degree students studying science and engineering with a view towards some of these students becoming future stewards of the stockpile,” according to a 2019 National Nuclear Security Administration report that was quoted in the ICAN report.

While universities have been fundamental to the development of nuclear weapons for the last 80 years, they have also played a prominent role in efforts to resist nuclear proliferation. Van Duzer said the report’s objective is to spark that pushback again.

He noted that the California Senate voted last year to urge the United States to sign a United Nations treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. The 2017 treaty has been signed by nearly 80 nations. The University of California, meanwhile, estimated that it would receive $8.9 million as part of its work on Los Alamos National Laboratory and $13.6 million from the Lawrence Livermore lab, according to the ICAN report. Both labs were created to design nuclear weapons and have budgets of more than $1 billion.

“If the elected representatives of the state feel like this is the way for the state to go, what about the state’s flagship university?” Van Duzer said.

So far, no university that he is aware of has endorsed the treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Neither the University of California nor Texas A&M responded to a request for comment in time for publication.

Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.